Blanco vs. Big Easy.

Deroy Murdock wrote in National Review Online As quickly as engineers drain the flood waters in New Orleans, evidence rushes in that state-level missteps deepened the Crescent City’s suffering during and after Hurricane Katrina. As hard as left-wing activists and liberal commentators try to blame President Bush and federal officials for this mess, their story continues to spring leaks. “I really should have called for the military,” Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D., La.) whispered to her press secretary, Denise Bottcher. “I really should have started that in the first call” to President Bush.

One reason she did not call for it earlier is she did not want to relinquish control to the Feds, but another reason is she wanted to punish Mayor Nagin for supporting her opponent (a Republican) in the 2003 election.ac

Blanco’s quiet confession was caught on tape while she sat in a studio between interviews on August 31. Her comments aired on Bayou State TV stations, appeared on CNN, and bounced around the Internet in recent days. On September 2, CNN’s Miles O’Brien pressed Blanco to explain when she called for federal troops to ride to New Orleans’s rescue:

O’BRIEN: Did you ask that the Pentagon deploy troops? Because that is a very specific request that a governor needs to make of the federal government.

BLANCO: We had troops being deployed. We had the first wave of troops being deployed at the level of 12,000. But before we even got to 12,000, I asked for 40,000. So you know, I saw that we needed a greater capacity.
O’BRIEN: When did you make that request, though?
BLANCO: Miles, I’m lost in the days.
O’BRIEN: When did you make that request?
O.K.
BANCO: I don’t even know what today is.
O’BRIEN: On Wednesday morning...
BLANCO: I made that request perhaps Wednesday.

So, in Blanco’s own words, she did not request federal troops until Wednesday, August 31, the day after the 17th Street Canal floodwall broke, drowning New Orleans; two days after Hurricane Katrina roared in from the Gulf of Mexico; three days after she and New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, on President Bush’s insistence, ordered the city’s mandatory evacuation; and four days after the president, in response to a letter from Blanco, declared a state of emergency along the Gulf Coast. So what happened that Wednesday? According to CNN’s Carol Lin, “Blanco called the White House to appeal for federal troops. President Bush was not available. Instead, she spoke to Homeland Security Adviser Francis Townsend. A senior administration official says that’s when troops started moving.” “The Cavalry” started to roll and reached the Big Easy in big trucks full of water, food, and medicine.

Should they have arrived before Friday morning, September 2? Everyone wishes so, but they likely would have shown up earlier had Blanco requested troops before mid-week as that crisis unfolded.

And if the New Orleans plan here, and the State of Louisiana plan here and here had been followed, the Feds would not have needed to act like a First Responder

Meanwhile, the board of commissioners of the Orleans Levee District, better known as the Orleans Levee Board, is emerging as another state agency that is, at best, distracted and, at worst, fatally corrupt. Located at 6001 Stars & Stripes Boulevard, the Orleans Levee Board is responsible for flood control as well as management of recreational projects on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. While such activities are within its charter, their gold plating and lack of privatization raise questions about their legitimacy... According to a state inspector general, the Levee Board suffers from “a long-standing and continuing disregard of the public interest.” In his agency’s defense, current Levee Board President Jim Huey told NBC’s Lisa Myers: “As far as the overall flood protection system, it’s intact. It’s there today. It worked. In 239 miles of levees, 152 floodgates, and canals throughout this entire city, there was [sic] only two areas” that failed, namely the 17th Street Canal and the Industrial Canal floodwalls.

This is akin to saying, “All of Grandpa’s blood vessels worked perfectly, except for the two that went ahead and got blocked before his stroke.”

One former Levee Board insider sees that agency as much more than hyperactive. Billy Nungesser, GOP ex-Governor Mike Foster’s Levee Board president in the mid-1990s, considers the organization lethally unethical. “Every rock you turn over is crooked,” he says by phone from his home in Belle Chase, Louisiana. “It was a cesspool of politics, bad spending, and wasted money that should have been spent on flood control.” He adds: “I have been quoted as saying, ‘If your kid dies in a flood or hurricane, come out here and shoot us, because we’re responsible for it.’”